LITTLE PEOPLE! Read online

  Table of Contents

  Working with the Little People

  United Imp

  A Cabin on the Coast

  Cargo

  Housing Problem

  The Goobers

  Fairy Tale

  A Gift of the People

  Trouble With Water

  Send No Money

  The Hob

  LITTLE PEOPLE!

  Edited by

  Gardner Dozois & Jack Dann

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-149-8

  Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  First printing: March 1991

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  http://www.baenbooks.com

  Magic Tales Anthology Series

  Edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

  UNICORNS!

  MAGICATS!

  BESTIARY!

  MERMAIDS!

  SORCERERS!

  DEMONS!

  DOGTALES!

  SEASERPENTS!

  DINOSAURS!

  LITTLE PEOPLE!

  edited by Terri Windling

  FAERY!

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

  “Working with the Little People,” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1977 by Harlan Ellison. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “United Imp,” by L. Sprague de Camp. Copyright © 1977 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Cabin on the Coast,” by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1981 by Gene Wolfe. First published in Zu den Sternen, edited by Peter Wilfert (Goldmann Verlag, Munich). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  “Cargo,” by Theodore Sturgeon. Copyright © 1948 by Theodore Sturgeon. First published in Unknown, November 1940.

  “Housing Problem,” by Henry Kuttner. Copyright © 1944 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., for Charm.

  “The Goobers,” by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1965 by Magnum-Royal Publications, Inc. First published in Swank, November 1965. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Richard D. Grant.

  “Fairy Tale,” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1981 by Jack Dann. First published in The Berkley Showcase, Vol. 4 (Berkley). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Gift of the People,” by Robert Sampson. Copyright © 1988 by Robert Sampson. First published in Full Spectrum (Bantam Spectra). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Trouble with Water,” by Horace L. Gold. Copyright © 1939 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. First published in Unknown, March 1939. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Send No Money,” by Susan Casper and Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Mid-December 1985.

  “The Hob,” by Judith Moffett. Copyright © 1988 by Judith Moffett. First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1988. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

  For Sheila Williams

  The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Susan Casper, Jeanne Van Buren Dann, Michael Swanwick, Janet Kagan, Patrick Delahunt, Virginia Kidd, Sheila Williams, Ian Randal Strock, and special thanks to our own editors, Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan.

  WATER SPRITES!

  “In Ohio, in that lake, when I was way under water down in the mud, they came looking. Watching me drown. They didn’t care. Their way. Not malicious. Just indifferent. When you came down, they scattered. It was dark but I saw them somehow or other. You never did . . . I carried that all alone—you, and seeing the People—and that was pretty bad later, when nobody else saw them. How I wanted you to see them. But you never did.”

  —From A Gift of the People by Robert Sampson

  Working with the Little People

  By Harlan Ellison

  Every writer has had the dreaded experience of sitting in front of a typewriter and finding that the words just won’t come; that no matter how hard you try your mind stays as blank as the paper, that you have run totally dry of ideas or inspiration. At such a time, a writer may think wistfully of how nice it would be to conjure up gremlins who would do your writing for you, as they were once said to perform cobbling and sewing and household chores in exchange for bowls of milk. Such a deal would be a writer’s dream . . .

  Or would it?

  One of the most acclaimed and controversial figures in modern letters, Harlan Ellison has produced thirty-seven books and more than nine hundred stories, articles, essays, and film and television scripts. He is the editor of Dangerous Visions; Again, Dangerous Visions; Media: Harlan’s World; and the forthcoming The Last Dangerous Visions. His short story collections include Partners in Wonder, Alone Against Tomorrow, The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, Approaching Oblivion, Deathbird Stories, Strange Wine, and Shatterday. A multiple award winner, he has won Nebula, Hugo, and Edgar awards, and three Writer’s Guild of America Awards for Most Outstanding Television Script. His screenplay I, Robot: the Movie was recently serialized in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and is the first screenplay in the history of the award to be nominated for a Nebula. His most recent book is the collection Angry Candy.

  * * *

  Nineteen years earlier, Noah Raymond had written his last fantasy. Since that time over four hundred brilliant stories had been published under his byline. All four hundred had come from his typewriter. What no one knew was that Noah Raymond had not written them. They had been written by gremlins.

  Success had come early to Raymond. He had sold his first story, “An Agile Little Mind,” to the leading fantasy pulp magazine of the period, when he was seventeen. It was slug-lined as a First Story, and the craft and imagination it displayed made him an instant cause célèbre. He sold a dozen more stories in the next two years and came to the notice of the fiction editor of a major slick magazine.

  The slick paid twenty times what the pulps could afford; the response was from a much wider readership; and as the fiction editor was sleeping with the anthologist who annually cobbled up the most prestigious collection of The Year’s Best Short Stories, Noah Raymond found himself, just four months short of his nineteenth birthday, with a novelette on that year’s table of contents between a pastiche by Katherine Anne Porter and a slice-of-life by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  His first collection was published when he was twenty. Knopf. The promotion manager became enthralled with the book and sent it around to Saroyan and Capote and by special messenger to John Collier. The prepublication quotes in the Times Book Review section were awesome. The word “genius” appeared eight times in a half-page.

  By the time he was twenty-five, because he was fecund, he had seven books to his credit and librarians did not file him under “science fiction/fantasy” but in the “modern literature” section. At age twenty-six his first novel, Every Morning at First Light, was selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate and was nominated as one of the finalists for the National Book Award.

  His personal papers were solicited for preservation in the Archive Library at Harvard and he went on a critically and financially impressive European lecture tour. He was twenty-seven.


  In the month of August, on a Friday night—the 20th, to be exact—at twenty-three minutes to midnight, to be tedious about it—Noah Raymond ran dry. That simply, that easily, that directly, that horrifyingly . . . he ran dry.

  He wrote the last original word of the last original idea he had, and abruptly found himself flensed of even the tiniest scintilla of an idea for a new story. He had an assignment from the BBC to write an original story that could be adapted for an hour-long dramatic special, and he hadn’t the faintest inkling of what he could write about.

  He thought for the better part of an hour, and the only idea that came to him was about a mad, one-legged seaman hunting a big white fish. He thrust the idea from him forcibly; it was redolent with idiocy.

  For the first time in his life, since the first moment he realized he had the gift of storytelling, the magic gift of stringing words together so they plumbed the human heart, he was empty of new thoughts. No more strange little fables about the world as he wished it to be, the world that lived in his mind, a world peopled by characters full and firm and more real than those with whom he had to deal each day. His mind was a vast, empty plain without structure upon it or roll to its topography . . . with nothing in sight but gray vistas that extended to limitless horizons.

  All that night he sat before his typewriter, urging his mind to dream, to go away from him in wild journeys. But the dreams were empty husks and his mind came back from the journeys as devoid of thoughts as an earthworm.

  Finally, when dawn came up over the valley, he found himself crying. He leaned across the typewriter, put his head on the cool metal, and wept. He knew, with the terrible certainty that brooks no exceptions, that he was dry. He had written his last story. He simply had no more ideas. That was the end of it.

  Had the world ended just then, Noah Raymond would have cheered. Then he would have had no anguish, no terror, no concern about what he would do tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that. And all the seamless, hopeless tomorrows that stretched before him like a vast, empty plain.

  Writing stories was Noah Raymond’s whole life. He had nothing else of consequence that approached by a million miles the job of telling a story. And now that the river had run dry, leaving only the silt of ideas he had worked endlessly and the tag-end memories of other people’s work, great classics half-remembered, seminal treatments of hoary clichés, he did not know what he would do with the remainder of his life.

  He contemplated going the Mark Twain route, cashing in on what he had already written with endless lecture tours. But he wasn’t that good a speaker and, frankly, didn’t like crowds of more than two people. He considered going the John Updike route: snagging himself a teaching sinecure at some tony Eastern college where the incipient junior editors of unsuspecting publishing houses were still in the larval stage as worshipful students. But he was sure he’d end up in a mutually destructive relationship with a sexually liberated English Lit major and come to a messy finish. He dandled the prospect of simply going the Salinger route, of retiring to a hidden cottage somewhere in Vermont or perhaps in Dorset, of leaking mysterious clues to a major novel forthcoming some decade soon; but he had heard that both Pynchon and Salinger were mad as a thousand battlefields; and he shivered at the prospect of becoming a hermit. And all that was left was the realization that what he had written was the sum total, that one year soon some snide bastard at The Atlantic Monthly would write a piercing, penetrating piece titled, “The Spectacular Rise and Soggy Demise of Noah Raymond, ex-Enfant Terrible.” He couldn’t face that.

  But there was no exit from this prison of sterilized nothingness.

  He was twenty-seven, and he was finished.

  He stopped crying into the typewriter. He didn’t want to rust the works. Not that it mattered.

  He crawled off to bed and slept the day. He woke at eight o’clock and thought about eating, forgetting for the moment that he was finished. But when the knowledge surged back to drown his consciousness, he promptly went into the bathroom and divested himself of the previous evening’s dinner, what had not been digested while he slept.

  Packing the queen mother of all headaches, he trudged into the tiny office off the living room, fearing to look at the neglected typewriter he knew would stare back at him with its hideous snaggle-toothed qwertyuiop grin.

  Before he stepped through the door he realized he’d been hearing the sound of the typewriter since he’d slid out of bed. Had heard, and had dismissed the sound as a product of nightmare and memory.

  But the typewriter was making its furious tack-tack-tack-space-tack sound. And it was not an electric typewriter. It was a manual, an old Olympia office machine. He did not trust electric typewriters. They continued humming maliciously when one paused to marshal one’s thoughts. And if one placed one’s hands on the keyboard preparatory to writing some measure of burning, immortal prose, and hesitated the slightest bit before tapping the keys, the insolent beast went off like a Thompson submachine gun. He did not like, or trust, electric typewriters, wouldn’t have one in the same house, wouldn’t write a word on one of the stupid things, wouldn’t—

  He stopped thinking crazy thoughts. He couldn’t write, would never write again; and the typewriter was blamming away merrily just on the other side of the room.

  He stared into the office, and in the darkness he could see the typewriter’s silhouette on the typing shelf he had built with his own hands. Behind it, the window was pale with moonlight and he could see the shape clearly. What he felt he was not seeing were the tiny black shapes that were leaping up and down on the keys. But he stood there and continued staring, and thought he was further around the bend than even the horror of the night before had led him to believe he could be. Bits of black were bounding up and down on the keyboard, spinning up into the pale square of glassed moonlight, then dropping back into darkness, bounding up again, doing flips, then falling into darkness once more. My typewriter has dandruff, was his first, deranged thought.

  And the sound of the old Olympia manual office machine was like that of a Thompson submachine gun.

  The little black bounding bits were working away at the keys of the typewriter in excess of 150 words per minute.

  “How do you spell necromancy,” said a thin, tiny, high, squeaky, sharp, speedy, brittle, chirping voice, “with two c’s or a c and a penultimate s?”

  There was a muffled “oof!” as of someone bashing his head against a hollow-core door, and then—a trifle on the breathless side—a second voice replied, “Two c’s, you illiterate!” The second voice was only slightly less thin, tiny, high, squeaky, sharp, speedy, brittle, and chirping. It also had a faintly Cockney accent.

  And the blamming on the keyboard continued.

  My life has been invaded by archy the cockroach, was Noah Raymond’s second, literary, even more deranged thought. In those days, the wonderful writings of the late Don Marquis were still popular; such a thought would have been relevant.

  He turned on the light switch beside the door.

  Eleven tiny men, each two inches high, were doing a trampoline act on his typewriter.

  The former enfant terrible sagged against the doorjamb, and he heard the hinges of his jaw crack like artillery fire as his mouth fell open.

  “Turn off that light, you great loon!” yelled one of the little men, describing a perfect Immelmann and plunging headfirst onto the # key while a pair of the little men with another pair of little men on their shoulders weighted down the carriage shift key so the one who had dived would get an upper-case # and not a lower-case 3.

  “Off, you bugger, turn it off!” shouted a trio of little men in unison as they ricocheted across each other’s trajectories to type p-a-r-s-i-m-o-n-i-o-u-s. They were a blur, bounding and dodging and shooting past each other like gnats around a dog’s ear.

  When he made no move to click off the light—because he was unable to move to do anything—the tallest of the little men (2¼”) did a two-step on the space bar and landed on the typewriter
carriage housing, arms akimbo and fists balled. He stared straight at Noah Raymond and in a thin, tiny, high, etcetera voice howled, “That’s it! Everybody stops work!”

  The other ten bounced off their targets and vacated the typewriter en masse. They stood around on the typing shelf, rubbing their heads, some of them removing their tiny caps to massage sore spots on foreheads and craniums.

  “Precisely how do you expect us to get ten thousand words written tonight with you disturbing us?” the little man (who was clearly the spokesman) said with annoyance.

  I can’t face the future, he thought. The delusions are starting already and it’s not even twenty-four hours.

  Another of the little men, somewhat shorter than the others, yelled, “ ’Ey, Alf. Cawnt’cher get this silly git outta f’ere? We’ll never ’ave done, ’e don’t move on!”

  Noah did not understand one word the littler little man had said.

  The tallest of the little men glared at the tiniest one and snarled, “Shut’cher yawp, Charlie.” His accent was the same as Charlie’s, dead-on Cockney. But when he looked back at Noah he returned to the precise Mayfair tones he had first used. “Let’s get this matter settled, Mr. Raymond. We’ve got a night’s work ahead of us, you’ve got a story due, and neither of us will manage if we don’t get this perishing explanation out of the way.”